By Frances Mulcahy MBBS (she/her)

What particular thing of interest might I have to say about how men think and emote? You may think “not much new, under the sun” about that subject. However, I think the fact that I spent the first 60 years of my womanhood living as a man does give me a novel perspective.

I was born in 1957, and assigned male at birth (AMAB). At this time, the patriarchal, binary, cis-gendered was normal, and the hetero-normative world was in full swing. There were very powerful family dynamics that constantly reminded me I was the first-born son and the protector of my younger sister. In my childhood and adolescent years, there was absolutely no public awareness of gender diversity, that I saw. Even in the late 1970s, at university, I was being taught that males who presented in woman’s clothes for any reason “suffered” a psychiatric disorder classed as a fetish, part of the group of disorders of sexual function (homosexuality had only just been removed from the official list at that time).

This is not a transition story, but I will say my gender awareness was a lightning bolt experience and, once struck, my course was set. I determined to live as my authentic self, and transition socially and medically, and with the huge relief of that freedom came a largely unexpected change in my emotional processing. This change occurred, in part, before correcting my hormone state to match my real gender. Hormones turbocharged the change.

As an apparently male healthcare professional, I prided myself that I was an empathic listener to my female patients. They reported that I was a good listener. As a professional, the emotional portion of a communication went like this: I listened to the content of a communication, verbal and non-verbal, and tried to identify the emotional tone. I contextualised the emotion against the content, and I would test my understanding by using a piece of empathic feedback to see if I “had the correct drift”. Summary – I would focus on content, not completely ignore the emotion and in a slightly patronising way see if I was “right”.

Now, my lifetime female brain is free to work, and on reflection, oh dear me, as a heritage faux male I had absolutely no idea. At least I did not dismiss emotion but oh, I was so very limited. I had no idea (did I say that already?).

I am about 15 months into my second puberty and my brain is settling down. I hear the emotional content in everything. It flows over me all the time. When I was early in puberty, the emotions ruled absolutely, and my loved ones experienced a mature-aged woman, possessor of a well-trained analytical mind, having wild adolescent mood swings. So much fun (to be clear, while being a roller coaster ride was a given, I have loved every moment of my freedom to be me)!

The only transgender woman I speak for is me. That said, I am not the only transgender woman I know with a similar experience. My non-binary friends have a wide range of roughly parallel stories.

My heritage male experience of emotional communication and processing was of a single track – black and white, and at a soft volume. The content message was white noise, unless an effort was made.

Me, today, a 62 year old woman with the emotional maturity of, I guess, a 25 year old, and my experience of emotional communication is akin to watching the New Year’s Eve fireworks on Sydney harbour. Oh-so-beautiful, yet apt to overwhelm.

My experience is that when a distinctly male mind is confronted with strong emotional tone it will ask, ‘what has caused this?’, rather than the more helpful question – ‘what does this emotion mean to the person expressing the emotion?’